Looking for fraud on AdWords, the team found something more mysterious
AdWords is the core of
the business of Google, delivering billions of data-targeted ads to
browsers every year. Most of the ads are legitimate, but not all of
them, and it’s Google’s job to tell which is which. Last year, that
meant kicking 224 million ads off the network. The majority were
run-of-the-mill web fraud: counterfeit handbags, thinly veiled phishing
schemes, the kind of thing any decent spam filter would take out. But in
2010, in the midst of reworking the ad-filtering model, something
strange happened. The new model was flagging a lot of otherwise
innocuous ads for used cars. Most of the bad products were counterfeit
goods, and, as AdWords engineering director David Baker says, "We'd
never heard of a counterfeit car." Had they trained AdWords into
anti-car prejudice? Was the model simply broken?
The answer turned out to be
even stranger. They were real cars, but they weren't really for sale.
Scammers were taking pictures of cars on the street, and when a hapless
customer showed up a few days later offering money, they'd steal the car
and hand it over. By the time the mark realized he had purchased stolen
goods, the sellers were long gone, taking his money with them. It's a
lucrative scam, and in China, a well-known one — but to anyone looking
at the ads, it just looks like one more crop of used-car ads.
For those who study fraud in
China, on the other hand, this is far from surprising. "These people are
very professional," says Dahui Li, an information systems expert at the
University of Minnesota who specializes in Chinese online fraud. In the
case of the car scam, he says the offline component is the most
important part, as a way to assure skeptical customers that the sale is
legit. "Chinese people want to see the product before they pay for it,"
Li says. "They have to see the car." So the criminal element developed a
scheme that could show it to them. READ MORE
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